


in the dark

by venndaai



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Archaeology Adventures, Childhood Trauma, F/F, Mildly Dubious Consent, POV Second Person, Sex Pollen, Sort Of, The Dark Side of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 09:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18232976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Darth Nox and Darth Zash explore a cave.





	in the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



The temple is old, the stone statues outside worn to unrecognizability by water and the moss that seems to grow on every available surface. Not particularly remarkable. You’ve seen a great many old temples by this point. On Korriban, Dromund Kaas, Hoth, Voss, Yavin Four. Forgotten gods are as familiar a sight as corpses, to you, and you consider them much the same way. They were here, now they’re not, but often they left something useful behind.

But there’s something about these statues, with their soft blurred faces, that strikes an uncomfortable chord, and you avoid looking at them. Zash notices, of course. Absolutely foolish of you to hope that she wouldn’t.

She reaches out a hand to touch one of the stooped figures, and despite yourself you’re fascinated to see some small insects rise out of the thick moss to buzz around her insubstantial fingers. “The statues, apprentice? I don’t see anything particularly interesting about them. Some dark side energy, of course, but you can see it’s much more potent inside.” The darkness gaping in the midst of the verdant green of the jungle; the entrance to something abandoned.

You sigh. “Should I just give up on you ever learning a better way to refer to me?”

Her laugh, full of blatantly false self deprecation. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I just keep forgetting. Habits seem to be terribly hard to break when one is technically dead. You know I don’t mean any disrespect by it.”

“Of course not,” you mutter. You rest your hand on a large pile of stone; it’s warm. This moon’s sun is young and hot. This place is nothing like Korriban, but the bone deep hum of dark energy makes all places taste the same. She’s probably more sensitive to it than you, now that she’s a Force ghost. Was probably more sensitive even when she was alive, but you’re not about to admit that.

You glare at the dark hole. It’s probably going to be cold inside, and full of unpleasant creatures. Coming down here alone was not one of your best ideas. You should have brought Talos, he’ll be disappointed if he learns you explored an ancient tomb without him. You should at the very least have brought one of your apprentices, to watch your back if the dark side energy here turns out to be more than you can handle.

But you didn’t, because you don’t like the looks on their faces when you talk to someone they can’t see. You’ve been biting back responses for days now. You need some time to get your ghost situation- sorted.

You don’t suppose the temple will look any more inviting the longer you put it off, so you shrug, lift your hand from the warm stone, and step down into the darkness.

 

It takes time for your eyes to adjust, coming from the brightness outside. Apparently eyes made of pure energy don’t have the same requirements, because you hear your former master say, “Oh, apprentice, look at this. How intriguing.”

You’re hardly about to admit any weakness to her, so you put away sight for the moment and let the Force guide your steps. Darkness is a familiar companion. As a child you were frequently punished with stints in a shipping container, when you were disobedient or slow or when the overseer was having a bad day. They kept you in darkness on Korriban, too, the first five days, until you were let out into the dry and the dust and the red, red light. You aren’t put off by a little dimness now. You can feel Vash in the Force, always, her presence so intimately familiar that it’s become almost comforting. A beacon. You don’t see her fingers outlined in shimmering blue against the stone wall, but you know that she is tracing something carved there.

“An inscription,” you guess, and reaching out with your own hand confirms it. You peel off a sticky, sweat-soaked glove to feel the script more accurately. Your eyes are adjusting, slowly, and you can see her, now, her faint blue glow, and the vague shapes of walls and ground and rough-hewn ceiling, but not much else.

“It’s the same script as the passages Tulak Hord transcribed, but, I believe, a different language. I can’t read this. At least not yet. Can you?”

Every time. Every time she says something like this and _you don’t know._ You don’t know if she’s mocking you. In life you observed her being condescending and cruel to her fellow Sith, although by Sith standards she was practically kind- you never saw her lash out in violence, or take pleasure in torment. That was a face she was presenting to you. This, these last few months, this has also been a face she is presenting to you, alternating harmless and scheming but always calm, friendly, pleasant. It’s doubtful you’ll ever see her true face.

It’s nonsensical for you to want to.

“No,” you say. “I can’t.” You know more languages than anyone in the place you came from, but you haven’t exactly had time to sit around studying dead tongues, and the learning is hard, bitter, uphill work, with a mind not trained for it since childhood. Your inadequacy in this area is perfectly reasonable. It still stings, having knowledge kept out of reach. Your fingers on the inscription curl, your hand clenching into a fist.

“Well,” she says, “no use dawdling around here, then,” and she turns and walks deeper into the dark.

 

It’s not a large temple, not far to walk, but with every step you feel something rising, thick and viscous in the dead air. Something invisible left down here to grow over the millenia. But if the artifact at the center of the temple is still there, it might be the key to dealing with your mental passenger for good.

The central chamber is lit, by flickering torches that burn without any apparent fuel source and cast a strangely weak and sickly brown light over a surprisingly small space. In the center is a plinth, and on top of the plinth, not a crystal, as you were expecting, but a stone tablet. You approach, look at it. It’s blank.

“Look, more of those statues, like the ones you were so interested in outside,” Zash says, “and some interesting friezes here too.” You’re not interested, not in friezes you won’t be able to properly see in this dim light or in statues whose faces you don’t want to see. You step forward. “I really think you ought to look at these friezes,” Vash says. You ignore her, and pick up the tablet, bringing it closer to your face just in case there’s something written on it after all, something you’re not seeing.

The torches go out. Something worms its way out of the tablet into your hands and up your arms, into your heart. You drop the stone; it hits your foot and you can’t stop a cry of pain from tearing its way out of your throat. You fall to your knees.

Silence. Darkness again, this time so complete and utter that opening and closing your eyes has no effect. You make a decision and screw your eyes tightly closed, so that darkness isn't as obvious. You take a deep breath. You are Darth Nox, a master of the Dark Council, one of the most powerful beings in this wretched galaxy. You can handle a little bit of pain. You can handle whatever it is that’s jumped into you. You’re an expert at evicting unwanted guests.

The pain is surely worse than it ought to be, and realizing that makes you suddenly dizzy and sick with fear. Fear is an old enemy, conquered so very long ago, and its return in force makes you want to scream. Your heart is hammering in your ears.

You should have been more careful. But you didn’t want to look at the statues.

You understand now. The faceless statues touched on a memory, one that had lain buried deep in the silt at the back of your mind for some time. A child’s memory, strangely sharp at the center and blurring into mist at the edges. It was your first kill. In the dark, you dragged the body to the shelter of a ditch, agonizingly slow through the hot night with your weak child arms.

The memory awakening now is not of that night, but of the hot afternoon two days later, when you went to look at your work and found the body had sprouted. Large-petalled flowers burst from the corpse’s mouth, its eyes, the hole in its skull. They looked like the poppies that coated the dunes after the spring rains, but they were a beautiful purple so dark it was almost black. And there had been no rain. Your throat was choked with dust.

It was your first moment of understanding that the universe did not run on unalterable laws- that it listened to you, it responded. Deep inside, you had wanted this thing that had been a person to become something else, and the universe had responded. A face lost its features, became an anonymous canvas.

You are certain this is not a thing that Zash could understand, and you do not want her to. Khem or Xalek, they probably could, but you do not want them to either. You have never had a desire to be known. The Force knows you. That’s enough.

Your heartbeat is slowing, at least, you tell yourself it is.

“That was a bit foolish, apprentice,” Zash says, and laughs, a light chuckle.

The pain is gone, the fear is gone, what washes over you now is anger, and when you spring to your feet you don’t even notice the shape your foot is in. You know where she is, and you’re on her in seconds. Your hands reach for her shoulders and when you grab her they do not pass through. In this darkness you can't see her transparency, her blue tone, and she's so solid under your hands, she might as well not be a ghost at all. In the darkness you can't see the calm expression she always wears as a mask. You shake her, and you hear her gasp. 

“There’s something in you,” she says. “I can feel it; there’s not a whole lot of extra room. It’s not a consciousness, just a tangle of dark energy amplifying your emotions. You must get yourself under control.”

“Must I?” you snarl, leaning in. “I don’t have to take your orders any more, _Master_.” You shove her against the stone plinth. You wonder what it’s like for her, feeling impact for the first time in several years. Feeling pain.

“I was merely offering you advice,” she says, a little breathless. “I was under the impression that was the reason you preserved my existence, offered me space in your mind if I’d remove myself from your monster’s. So I could advise you.”

“It wasn’t,” you say. You’re leaning over her now, face angled down so you would be looking into her eyes if there was any light. You can't feel any breath on your face. That disappoints you. But you can feel her holding herself very still, muscles tensing under your grip. 

“We should leave,” she says. “I doubt this place holds the answers we seek. And as long as you remain down here you will continue to be affected by this… emotional lability.”

“As long as I remain down here,” you say, “I can touch you.” You let go of her shoulders, rest your elbows on the top of the plinth, arms bracketing her head. Your knees bracket her thighs. “Do you want me to leave?”

A longer pause than you've ever drawn from her before, and then, “No,” she says. You feel her hands on your face, sliding down to your neck. The only exposed parts of you. Her fingers are cool, but not cold. 

 

This is not going to fix anything, you think as you lean in, but you do it anyway.


End file.
